What’s the most impactful thing you’ve ever done ? We’ve all done good deeds and made a difference before, but few of us have helped catch a serial killer, inspiring a book and a Netflix movie in the process.
An ICU nurse from New Jersey can make this claim, however. Read on and you’ll see why Amy Loughren’s work in catching serial killer Charles Cullen is most definitely worth making a movie about.
Loughren and Cullen worked together in the ICU.
Amy Loughren told People that they had a great working relationship: Charles Cullen was funny and seemed to be good at his job, and he and Loughren quickly struck up a friendship.
The whole time, Cullen was murdering patients.
His methods help explain why he escaped detection for so long: he’d put regular medications, like insulin or heart meds, in patients’ IV bags, but in lethal doses. Eventually, police started investigating the weird lab reports that were coming out after patients’ autopsies.
An investigator asked Loughren for help.
“She came off as a strong-minded, intelligent individual, so I rolled the dice and revealed some of our findings to her,” said Detective Danny Baldwin.
After he showed the lab reports to Loughren, she could only conclude that something was very wrong.
Loughren realized what was happening.
It was clear that Cullen was murdering patients, but with scant evidence, how could he be stopped before he struck next? At this point, Loughren agreed to wear a hidden recording device in an effort to get a confession out of Cullen.
He freely admitted to the murders.
When Loughren confronted him, wearing a wire, at a restaurant, he didn’t deny it.
“He sat straight up,” Loughren recalls. “The color of his eyes changed. He put a smirk on his face and said, ‘I’m going to go down fighting.'”
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He was quickly arrested.
Cullen confessed to murdering many patients. He was eventually convicted of 29 murders, though it’s believed that he may have killed up to 400 patients at various hospitals. In 2006, he was sentenced to 11 consecutive life sentences.
Author Charles Graeber wrote a book about the saga.
Called The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness and Murder , the New York Times bestseller was released in 2014. Netflix snatched up the movie rights and started production on a film starring Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne.
Chastain sees Loughren as an inspiration.
“So often in films about serial killers, we’re celebrating aggression as the way to stop violence, and rarely do we acknowledge love and understanding can heal that pain,” Chastain said . “Amy didn’t use any aggressive tactics. She used her heart to find a way forward.”
The movie comes out on Netflix on October 26.
It’s already playing in select theaters and will hit the streaming platform on October 26th.
Let us know what you think of this harrowing real-world drama in the comments. How would you have handled this if you were Amy Loughren?
